Research Questions

I'm interested in working in your research group. Where do I sign up?

Do you respond to generic emails asking to come to MIT?

Yes, but I just send stock emails. Like this one, for a prospective Ph.D. student:

Dear Prospective Student,
Thank you for your interest in my research. Information about applying to the MIT Physics Ph.D. program is available at:
http://web.mit.edu/physics/prospective/graduate/index.html
Information about my current research interests is available at:
http://www.jthaler.net/research
I am happy to discuss opportunities to join my group once you are accepted to MIT.
Sincerely,
Jesse Thaler

If you want to get a more detailed response, then you need to make a more personal connection, at minimum by including my name in your email. Or saying that your undergraduate advisor (include your advisor's name!) recommended that you contact me. Or that you are interested in a specific paper of mine (including the reference!). But generic emails saying “Dear Professor, I am very interested in your work.” will get the stock email.

Do you have advice for a starting theoretical physicist?

For me, taking a course in quantum mechanics from Antal Jevicki was the key turning point when I realized that I wanted to pursue theoretical physics as a career. But it was not until I went to graduate school that I realized exactly what it means to be on the front lines of scientific progress. So until you experience the simultaneous frustration and exhilaration of research, it is hard to really grasp what it means to be theoretical physicist on a day-to-day basis.

When I taught quantum mechanics myself at MIT (8.06), I gave the following advice to my students on the last day of class (mostly juniors, many of whom would go on to graduate school in physics and related fields):

Find mentors. Even now as a faculty member, I have around five senior colleagues I regularly turn to for advice. As a younger scientist, it is even more important to have someone (and preferably multiple people) who are looking out for your best interests and giving you honest feedback. In most cases, your mentor will also be your research advisor, but it is generally a good idea to also have a mentor outside of your research group as well. Your mentors will often be your strongest advocates when it comes time to get a permanent job in academia (or elsewhere).

Be visible. Somehow society's image of a theoretical physicist is a lone genius toiling away in a closed office. The reality is that physics (especially theoretical physics) is a social enterprise, with many research ideas arising at the coffee machines (or at the lift lines if you go here in the winter). As a younger scientist, you might feel that the best thing you can do is focus on your specific research project and exclude the outside world, but in my experience, making yourself visible is a better way to forward your research career. This means that you should go to as many seminars and colloquia as you can (and even try to go to dinner with the speaker), as well as discuss your work regularly with people outside of your immediate research group. For me, I credit regular lunches with my Berkeley theory colleagues at this restaurant with saving me from the research doldrums (get the red rice).

Tell a story. Science is a process of discovering the ultimate truths of nature, and while the truths themselves are independent of the research process, research itself is shaped by the personalities involved. In order to make sure that other scientists understand and appreciate your work, you need to make an effort to explain not just the results of your work, but why your work is interesting and important and how it fits into the narrative arc of the field. This means that you have to develop strong writing and presentation skills. Bland research results are difficult to appreciate, but telling a compelling story about your research (in print or in person) is a great way to engage your audience.

If you are looking for more advice, I found this transcript of a podcast by my MIT colleauge Peter Fisher to be quite enlightening (especially the part about the fish).

What are some things I should aim to achieve during my PhD?

There are as many ways to be a successful physicist as there are successful physicists. That said, there are skills that are highly correlated with research success. So if you are motivated by checking off boxes, here are some tasks that most (though not all) graduate students in theoretical physics complete by the end of their PhD.

How do you come up with your acronyms?

You mean “ABRACADABRA” (A Broadband or Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection with an Amplifying B-field Ring Apparatus)? Or “DarkLight” (Detecting A Resonance Kinematically with Leptons Incident on a Gaseous Hydrogen Target)? Or the infamous “P...B...S...” (Polynomial… Basis… for… Substructure…, see footnote 10), which would likely best the competition at DOOFAAS? I write down a sentence describing the idea, take the first letters of (most) of the words, and watch my collaborators cringe.

Teaching Questions

Have you ever let your students down?

During the covid pandemic in Spring 2020, we faced difficult decisions about how to assess student understanding of the material in 8.044 (Statistical Mechanics). One student asked whether the final assignment grade could be dropped if their problem set grades were higher. In response, I posted the following message to Piazza:

We have developed the following official policy about whether it might be possible to give up the final assignment grade.

At the end of the semester, some students got together to make their opinions known:

I appreciated their candor in telling us just how they're feeling and making us understand. Certainly, a learning experience for everyone. Thank goodness we were on emergency pass/no record grading.

Personal Questions

What are your preferred pronouns?

He/him/his.

I have debated many times with myself about whether I should put this information in my email signature. “Jesse” is a somewhat gender ambiguous name, and I don't mind (too much) when people add an extra “i” by mistake. It feels a bit uncomfortable to assert my gender at this point in my career when the gender ambiguity in my name (and in my past hairstyle) was part of my experience growing up. Also, physics is a rather male-dominated field, and I worry that providing my pronouns would somehow reinforce male-ness as the default for a physics professor, though I also appreciate that my reticence is probably doing so implicitly.

In any case, I do like the way that providing pronouns signals an aspiration towards a more diverse and inclusive physics environment. As I often tell my students: there are as many ways to be a successful physicist as there are successful physicists. So while I don't currently give my preferred pronouns, my email signature does have a link to the MIT Physics Community Values.

Website Questions

Why a wiki?

Though I loved my old black and white webpage, I never got around to editting it much. In the wiki format, editing and viewing pages take the same amount of work, so my innate narcissism will drive me to actually make updated content. Or at least that's the hope…

What wiki server do you use?

Why don't you ever update your website?

Why don't you have a blog?

See above. Though I do think that scientific communication to the general public is very important, so I participate in the TheoryNet program to visit high school physics classes in the Boston area. Also, I appear briefly in a particle physics documentary.

Who chose your color scheme?

What? You don't like orange links? I was semi-inspired by the SFJAZZ poster hanging in my office, but a certain someone refused to let me use purple. Consider yourself lucky I didn't use the 2004 color scheme.